• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, November 10, 2014

Companies often embrace the future only when they can’t avoid it, and there seems to be a little of that going around online.

Forever it seems, big media seemed pretty content to pay only minimal attention to streaming video -- indeed, three of the big four networks that own Hulu last year came very close to dumping it. Established media seemed to deny cord-cutters or cord-nevers existed, but now some funny business is going on. Maybe they’re noticing that they’re...wrong.

“After listening to a busy week of third quarter media earnings calls, we were surprised by the honest tone of management teams on the bleak state of national advertising trends,” reports MoffettNathanson blog .

It goes on: “After already lowering numbers coming into earnings, five of the eleven national TV advertising line items we track across our media companies missed our estimates during 3Q.”

What’s the cause? Well, they say, Nielsen’s ratings flubs are causing some weird quarter-to-quarter comparisons  (creating some “shockingly bad ratings”). But, says MoffettNathanson, “there is finally a growing acknowledgement that the shift to digital platforms is taking share out of TV budgets.”

So maybe a little -- noticing that shift is finally causing a shift in attitude about digital. No doubt, recent new forays into OTT by CBS, HBO, Univision and more were going to happen sooner or later, in some form.

And it’s hard to tell if this point in time is sooner or later. But while they have been on the sidelines, a generation of viewers is growing who are not watching television in the conventional sense. Some never have. Some never will again.  

Journalists and your basic corner-of-the-bar wag, I think, like to overestimate this, because it’s dramatic change. You, like me, are always hearing about the people who only stream and "don't even own a TV." 

There’s tons of better research than that anecdotal stuff, but to me, it seems, the half-heartedness established media exhibited for streaming video may now be biting them in the ass. Consumers, particularly younger ones, are not just choosing online video because it’s handy or peculiarly intimate, though both of those are true. They may be choosing it as a rejection of the old style commercialism of “old” television. Playing catch-up with those people will be hard to do; it’s like selling a new, improved hamburger to newly-made vegetarian.

There’s a fascinating essay on by Joe Marchese, CEO of Truex, on The Wall Street Journal’s CMO blog, in which he makes the provocative observation that rates for advertising impressions are  are based on the potential for attention, not real attention.

Now that there are ways around those impressions, or new ways to get better impressions, he kind of argues, consumers are learning the actual meaning of the phrase “to pay attention.”

“Our attention’s value fluctuates wildly depending on any number of variables, including who is holding it and who is giving it,” he writes. “And, whether we’re in the ad industry or not, we are all in the business of 'mining' human attention.”

Although I may be putting words in his mouth, I think it’s fair to say that lots of potential television viewers -- hit with the alternative that online video presents -- are concluding conventional media are not always worth it. That may be a hard attitude to turn around, and it now appears the media giants will find out.

pj@mediapost.com